Travel the world. Meet inter-esting people. Learn some-thing, or simply escape. Allfrom the comfort of your

seat at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas dur-ing the 25th annual Vancouver Jew-ish Film Festival.The festival opens on Nov. 7, 7:30

p.m., with The Zigzag Kid. Based ona David Grossman novel, it is acharming, fun movie. The story cen-tres on Nono, the son of “the best in-spector” in Holland. Nono aspires tobe as good a detective as his fatherand he soaks up everything that hisfather teaches him about surveil-lance, how to handcuff a suspect,etc. The one thing his father can’tbring himself to share with Nono,however, is what Nono really mostwants to know: more about hismother, who died when he was onlyone year old.While Gaby, his father’s “secre-

tary,” understands that aspect ofNono, whose bar mitzvah is im-pending, his father seems oblivious.But then, as Nono is on the train tohis uncle’s – punishment for yet an-other exploit that went perfectly asplanned in Nono’s head, but not somuch in reality – he finds a letter hid-den within the wrapper of his choco-late bar. Ostensibly from his father,it sends Nono on a mission that con-nects him to his father’s nemesis, thegreat criminal Felix Glick, fromwhom Nono hopes not only to learnhow to become the best detective,but also to find out more about hismother. With only a photo to go on,Nono and Glick travel to the FrenchRiviera, engaging in many an ad-venture, including Nono’s introduc-tion to, not-so-coincidentally, Gaby’sfavorite singer, Lola Ciperola, whoGlick just happens to know.Director Vincent Bal keeps things

light and moving along, all in a col-orful, stylized fashion, while not shy-ing away from the story’s seriousthemes, good versus evil, knowingoneself, and the importance of fam-ily among them. The cast includes awonderful debut performance byThomas Simon as Nono, as well asstrong performances by a very lik-able Jessica Zeylmaker as Gaby, Fed-ja van Huêt as the perfect TV-type

cop/Nono’s dad, Burghart Klaussneras the grandfatherly master crimi-nal/teacher and veteran actress Is-abella Rossellini as Lola; Camille DePazzis as a seductive, temperamen-tal mystery woman rounds out thelead roles.

The Zigzag Kid – in Dutch, Eng-lish and French with English subti-tles – is recommended for viewers 8and up. To see the trailer for the mul-tiple-award-winning film, visit men-emshafilms.com/zigzag-kid.The next film on the VJFF lineup

is Oma & Bella, on Nov. 8, 1 p.m. Adocumentary, Oma & Bella is per-haps unexpectedly remarkable. Omais Regina Karolinski, filmmaker AlexaKarolinski’s grandmother, and BellaKatz is Oma’s best friend. Bella hasmoved in temporarily with Oma,who has had a hip replacement, butthe two interact and move in Oma’ssmall apartment with the ease of peo-ple who have known each other fora very long time and still enjoy eachother’s company, even if it’s justsilently cooking a meal together.The documentary mostly takes

place in the kitchen, where the au-dience witnesses these two feistywomen cooking up a storm of tra-ditional Jewish (non-vegetarian)food. However, among other places,we also join them on a trip to themarket, an appointment at the hair-dresser and a visit to the cemetery,where many of the people theyknew have been buried. Holocaustsurvivors, Oma and Bella share withAlexa, and the audience, not onlysome of the happy memories, butalso some of the absolutely horrificmemories, of their childhoods inGermany, where they still live.Simply filmed, without any bells

and whistles, Oma & Bella success-fully communicates the deep friend-ship between these women and theirdetermination to enjoy life despiteits hardships. We get to meet someof the family that they have built, andto be a part of their table. Food playsa large part in their lives and the film,and viewers can actually buy TheOma & Bella Cookbook and see atrailer for the documentary, which isin German with English subtitles, atomabella.com.The American documentary The

Real Inglorious Bastards (Nov. 10,2:30 p.m., with director Min Sook Leein attendance) tells the story of Op-eration Greenup, one of the mostsuccessful missions by the U.S. gov-ernment’s Office of Strategic Servicesin the Second World War. The op-eration comprised only three oper-atives, two Jewishrefugees who enlisted inthe U.S. army, Hans Wijn-berg (whose parents senthim to America from Hol-land to escape the Nazis)and Fred Mayer (whosefamily fled Germany asthe war was beginning),and a Wehrmacht officerwho deserted, prisoner-of-war Franz Weber. Thethree parachuted into theAustrian Alps, and thenheaded to Weber’s home-town, where his sistersand mother helped thetrio monitor Nazi move-ments and pass along thatinformation to the Allies.

The Real Inglorious Bas-

Escape to cinema for week of VJFFCYNTHIA RAMSAY

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Parents have the best of in-tentions when they seekto provide every possiblesupport for their chil-

dren’s endeavors and to shieldthem for the challenges of grow-ing up and the dangers in theworld around them. Unfortunate-ly, too often, in the interest of pro-tecting them and producinghigh-achievers, parents spendtheir energy micromanaging theirchildren’s time and energies, andfail to recognize that the verythings that make teenagers chal-lenging (bad attitude, narcissism,recklessness, bursts of anger, etc.),for example, may be the very traitsthat could help move them intohealthy adulthood, blessings in-stead of curses. The author of twobest-selling parenting books, TheBlessing of a Skinned Knee and itsfollow up The Blessing of a B Minus, Dr. Wendy Mogel will talkabout Using Jewish Teaching toRaise Self-Reliant, Optimistic,Grateful Children in a NervousWorld, on Tuesday, Nov. 12, 7p.m., at Temple Sholom.Mogel has been a practising clin-

ical psychologist for 35 years, butbecame interested in child devel-opment and parenting issues as acollege student after a summer jobworking with emotionally dis-turbed children. By phone from herLos Angeles office, Mogel told theIndependent that it was these kids’unique “way of looking at things”that piqued her interest. “I startedto think about the whole range ofnormal, and that so many of thechild behaviors that we call psy-chopathology, or see as a problem,come from the expectations of theculture or from parents who areconfused about how to respond totheir children. Parents,” she said,“either tend to be too kind or toofirm, or a combination of what Icall ‘nice, nice, nice, nice, furious.’”Parenting issues vary from

culture to culture, but some areasof concern are consistent, at leastin the contemporary North Amer-ican context.“We now have the idea that we

would like kids to skip adoles-cence entirely because it’s too

dangerous and we have a ‘onefalse move’ view of teenage life,because we are displacing ouranxiety about a rapidly changingworld and a possibly meltingplanet and a fluctuating economyand a highly sensationalized me-dia, or a media that likes to pro-mote the sensational but low-probability dangers. We displacethat all onto our children and thenwe overprotect them, overindulgethem and overschedule them andexpect them to be perfect in everysingle area, except what I call‘family citizenship,’ which is help-ing out at home and being re-sponsible and doing things whenyou’ve been told once, instead offive times. So yes, we don’t ex-pect them to be good family cit-izens and we allow them toexchange good grades, popular-ity, athletic prowess and a goodcollege admissions placementwith character.”Academic success, like a high

grade point average, for example,can be a fair predictor of a stu-dent’s wellbeing, but can’t be re-lied upon, particularly in moreprivileged environments. Lookingat GPA, however, can lead to in-teresting conclusions about the in-tersections of race and class inschool-aged children.“What I see in my practice,

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Discovering blessingsBASYA LAYE

Healing TextsArmstrong’s War gets its worldpremière in Vancouver / 7

Dr. Wendy Mogel

Generations Special Issue

ThomasSimon makeshis debut inThe ZigzagKid, whichopens theVancouverJewish FilmFestival onNov. 7.

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working with kids who have verymany advantages, is that their GPAmay actually be the cause of thelack of their wellbeing becausethey are so highly stressed, becausethey can’t imagine surpassing theirparents’ level of achievement andbecause they believe that in orderto be successful, especially the girls,they can’t get a single grade belowan A, and they need to play on avarsity team and take AP classesand get into one of only 10 col-leges. So, we see in those kids anincrease in eating disorders, self-injury, in anxiety, in depression,”Mogel explained. “And then, on theother hand, the underprivilegedkids, deprived of a good educa-tional system and support and par-ents who know how to guide theminto manoeuvring institutions toserve them exactly the way theywish, that those kids face a muchmore challenging adulthood be-cause they’re not provided with thebasic skill set that leads to suc-cessful adulthood….”Mogel reminds parents that rais-

ing independent, self-reliant andresilient kids might mean allowingthem to make some mistakes alongthe way, and that these decisions,however faulty (barring seriousdanger) are actually blessings indisguise. Not all of these blessingswill be easy to swallow, at leastfor the helicopter parents outthere. One of these “blessings” forteenagers, for example, is “theblessing of a hangover,” andMogel suggests that parents devel-op a certain level of acceptance ofthe fact that their kids might ex-periment with their sexuality orwith alcohol or other substances.They might even embrace it. Theparents that Mogel meets in herpractice and in public don’t neces-sarily raise their eyebrows at thispiece of advice, however.“When we actually talk about it,”

she explained, “what I say to themis, the kids are going off to collegeor university where the only per-son in charge of them is a 19-year-old resident advisor in the dorm.And, in many cases, she just tookthat job so that she could have a sin-gle room instead of a double room,and she’s just one year ahead ofyour child.“I give the example of the jour-

ney from slavery in Egypt to thePromised Land and that thePromised Land is the Land of Milkand Honey, and the reason thatGod insisted that Moses lead thepeople on this incredibly long jour-ney, 40 years, instead of the routethat could have taken 40 days –which, apparently, was possible –they needed to get used to, to beprepared for, freedom. And wecan compare the Land of Milk andHoney to the ‘Land of College,’which is beer pong and co-eddorms. The amount of grumblingand complaining that the peopledid in this trip across the desert ishuge – they were constantly furi-ous with Moses and constantlycomplaining and basically wanted

to go back to Egypt, just wantingto go back to ‘childhood.’ So, it isimportant for teenagers to makemistakes and then learn from theirmistakes instead of being bubble-wrapped and then shipped rightoff to college without having made any choices on their own.So the hangover is a literal hang-over, but it’s also a metaphor forindependent, mature decision-making.” She added, “Good judg-ment comes from experience andexperience comes from a little bitof bad judgment.”Mogel’s website offers some of

the concrete tools related in herbooks (as well as group studyguides) so that parents have someadditional help to navigate the chop-py waters of child rearing. In fact,her website (wendymogel.com)even contains a 26-step program“for good parents gone bad,” likethe tip to “Remember that disap-pointments are necessary prepara-tion for adult life” and “Before younag, remind, criticize, advise, chimein, preach or over-explain, say toyourself WAIT or Why Am I Talk-ing? Listen four times more than you talk.”The WAIT acronym (which

might be familiar to anyone whohas done a 12-step program) is notjust for parents. “It’s actually a goodteaching for these over-chatty kids,”she said. “So many kids … I say thatwe’re both afraid for them andafraid of them, and we kind of treatthem like handicapped royalty, sowe allow them to interrupt adultsand go on and on. So, the kidscould think about why they’re talk-ing, as well.”Understanding the economy of

speech and the importance of lis-tening is something that Mogelchallenges parents to discover, andshe read from a University ofKansas study that showed that“children in families that are re-ceiving government assistance,low-income families, hear approx-imately 600 words an hour; work-ing-class kids, 1,200 words an hour;children of professionals, 2,100words an hour.” And the childrenthat Mogel works with in her prac-tice? “A lot of the families that Iwork with, I think, hear four billionwords an hour. They just learn notto listen, because the parents areconstantly talking at them, givingthem advice, solving their prob-lems, nagging them, making deci-sions for them, and not listening.”With kids – and parents – so

busy with multiple responsibilitiesand commitments, Mogel said thatlife can start sounding like, “Hurry,hurry, hurry! Get in the car! Let memake you some flashcards for yourtest tomorrow! Come and eat yourdinner! Start studying!”Even expecting our kids to list

the minutiae of their day can beseen as a new parenting expecta-tion. The very assumption that par-ents are interested in the nitty-grittydetail of what that friend said to the

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other friend, or how a teacher re-sponded to an assignment or an in-terpersonal situation is moreindication that parenting has be-come a hypervigilant extreme sport.“This is a big part of what my

lecture is about that I’ll be givingin Vancouver. I say that our par-ents barely knew what grade wewere in off the top of their heads– the dads, they’d say, ‘I think, fifth!’Not knowing the names of everysingle one of your friends and hav-ing rank ordered them and rankordered their parents and know-ing how to speak in a secret codeto the principal to make sure thatyour child gets the ’better’ as op-posed to the ‘good’ second-gradeteacher, and knowing how tospeak in a secret code about thatso you’re talking about ‘learningstyles’ and not that we don’t wantour child to have her becausewe’ve heard that she doesn’t likethe boys or she’s getting too old toteach. You used the word ‘minuti-ae,’ psychologists call it enmesh-ment. And then, the kids go off tocollege or even summer camp andthe parents have parental separa-tion anxiety – the kids are fine!”Non-parents, like teachers,

aunts, uncles and grandparents,also have a role to play, and thatrole is surprisingly significant, butthey should be mindful of howthey will be received if criticizingsomeone else’s parenting.“It’s extremely difficult for non-

parents to watch this insanity andnot step in with horror or advice,and if they do step in with ‘horri-fied advice,’ advice born of horror,the parents will say, ‘You don’t un-derstand! The playing field haschanged. All of this is necessary.’Because the parents have drunkthe Kool-Aid.”There is a role for non-parents,

however. “I interview middleschoolers and teenagers all the timeand I ask them a set of questions.I ask them what their parents wor-ry about that they don’t need toworry about; what they should wor-ry about that they don’t; what sweet-est things their parents do that theirparents might not realize they ap-preciate; what they like to do withtheir parents; the difference be-tween their parents’ teenage yearsand theirs; what their parents don’tunderstand about texting,” she said.“Then I ask them what non-parentperson in their life is an inspirationaladult, is someone that they turn to,either because they wish to emu-late or for guidance, or because theperson is so much more chilled outthan their parents. And they answerin one second, it’s incredible. I’venever run into a child who didn’tanswer in one second, and it’severybody: it’s an aunt, it’s ateacher, it’s a coach, it’s a neighbor,it’s a slightly older child, a youngadult. I just did this in Boston. It’sso fast, it’s stunning, that every sin-gle one of these kids not only hassomeone like that but doesn’t evenhave to think for a minute to figureout who it is,” she continued, re-

trieving the list so that she couldread the responses: “Camp coun-selor. My mom’s best friend. Mybabysitter. My cousins in Sweden.My ballet teacher. My family friend.My aunt. My granny…. The olderkid who taught me how to sing be-cause he led the choir.“So, yes, giant role! A giant

counter-balancing role because theparents drank the Kool-Aid, [they]are so worried for the future and,when I say this, this is good inten-tions; loving, devoted parents.These are parents who only wantthe best for their kids but their kidsdesperately need these, as the kidsalways put it to me, more ‘chilledout’ adults. The answers to all thesequestions are so sweet.”It’s heartening to hear from kids

and teens about these relationships,but there are also surprises when itcomes to the kids’ responses aboutwhat things their parents do thatthey love most.“The most surprising, sweetest

things that one of the girls in the lastset of interviews, this was in NewYork, said, ‘When I was in middleschool, my parents stopped tuck-ing me in, but I secretly know thatevery night before my dad – firstshe said, ‘This is going to sound sodorky!’ And this is in groups of eightto 10 kids of mixed grades, and shewas one of the younger ones, therewere 12th-graders in this group....And I said, ‘Do it, do it, do it!’ Andshe said, ‘Every single night, whenmy dad thinks I’m asleep, he comesinto my room and tucks just a littlebit.’ And she said, ‘Now that I’m say-ing it out loud, it even sounds a lit-tle bit creepy, but it’s so sweet andI love it so much.’ I was so touchedthat she would say that. And in frontof 12th-graders! She turned pur-ple…. One girl said, ‘When I getinto the car, my mom puts her handon my arm.’ And the other girl said,‘Does she kind of stroke it up anddown?’ And the girl said, ‘Yes, shedoes. But I have to make her stopbecause she’s driving!’ I was mim-ing it and I realized that your lefthand is on the steering wheel ifyou’re stroking your child’s armwith your daughter in the passen-ger seat ... so it’s actually kind ofdangerous, which made it evenmore touching.”Those moments inhabit some of

the best of parent-child relation-ships, Mogel said. “It’s so importantto get the best, because I’m a clin-ical psychologist, so, in my practiceand in my work with my col-leagues, I hear lots of the worst, andthe disasters, and there is so muchrobust beauty between teenagersand their parents, but everybody’skeeping it a secret!” �

Dr. Wendy Mogel’s visit is sponsoredby Vancouver Talmud Torah, KingDavid High School, Richmond Jew-ish Day School, Jewish Federationof Greater Vancouver, ShalhevetGirls High School, Vancouver He-brew Academy and Pacific TorahInstitute. Tickets, $20, are availableat talmudtorah.com.

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